Kyrgyzstan used to be an exception in Central Asia: the sole democracy in a region run by strongmen, albeit a flawed one. That is rapidly ceasing to be the case under Sadyr Japarov, the increasingly authoritarian president.
Mr Japarov became president in dramatic fashion. After widespread vote-buying marred a parliamentary election in 2020, citizens took to the streets and soon toppled the president. Amid the chaos his allies sprung him from prison, where he was serving a sentence for kidnapping, and installed him as prime minister. He became president in a cleanish election a few months later. He has since banned outspoken media outlets and jailed political opponents.
He removed the single-term limit on the presidency and transformed Kyrgyzstan from a parliamentary democracy into one where the president calls the shots. Parliament passed legislation reverting to a first-past-the-post system for its 90 seats, ostensibly to prevent candidates from bribing their way onto party lists; the effect is to diminish the role of parties. At a parliamentary election on November 30th 2025, only one party fielded candidates; other contenders were nominally independent, including Mr Japarov's allies. Turnout was 36.9%.
He has also redesigned the national flag (to make the sun at its centre look less like what he said was a sunflower), renamed a regional capital Manas after a Kyrgyz epic poem, and introduced legislation modelled on Russia's "foreign agents" law, requiring NGOs that receive overseas funding to register as "foreign representatives".
After three revolutions in two decades, some voters are willing to tolerate shrinking political freedoms as the price of stability. Edil Baisalov, a deputy prime minister, says: "Democracy shouldn't be about noise, it should be about delivery."
Kyrgyzstan is a former Soviet state in Central Asia. Remittances account for around a fifth of GDP; in 2024 some 93% of them, around $2.8bn, came from Russia.
Kyrgyzstan has been helping Russia evade sanctions, for which several Kyrgyz banks and crypto exchanges are themselves under Western sanctions. Sanctions-busting has helped the economy grow by roughly 9% a year since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, more than twice the rate in the half-decade before the pandemic.
Kyrgyzstan has a security pact with the Kremlin and hosts Russian military bases. America vacated an air base in Kyrgyzstan in 2014. Vladimir Putin has described the country under Japarov as a "reliable partner".
Osh is the country's second city.
When man calls an animal "vicious", he usually means that it will attempt to defend itself when he tries to kill it.